Category: Local News

The developer behind the Highway 83 and Walker Road rezoning also owns the private water utility that would serve it — a new plant regional reviewers say is about $1m short of funding.

Having failed to get a quiet “yes,” Buc-ee’s is taking its convenience-store claim to the elected Board of County Commissioners. Its 298-page appeal argues the county’s code, read literally, makes a 74,000-square-foot travel plaza a “convenience store” — and that the board, as the code’s “ultimate interpreter,” should say so.

The administrative shortcut Buc-ee’s chose has produced no answer. El Paso County’s planning director says she cannot determine whether the proposed 74,000-square-foot travel plaza on Monument Hill is a “convenience store”—so she has neither approved it nor denied it. The one party who can appeal the non-ruling is Buc-ee’s itself.

Residents are writing to El Paso County by the dozen to oppose the proposed travel plaza on Monument Hill. The county is logging every message—and stamping each one “not part of the official record.”

A travel-center giant that much of the Tri-Lakes has opposed—and that would sit about two miles from the new Greenland wildlife crossing—is asking a single county official to wave it through, by ruling that a 74,000-square-foot plaza is just a “convenience store.”

El Paso County’s planning commission has voted 6-1 to recommend rejecting two rezonings that would allow apartments beside Monument Academy and the rural Walden neighborhood. The county commissioners will have the last word on July 23rd. For the better part of four hours on June 18th, the El Paso County Planning Commission listened to residents […]

Colorado Springs approved a data center on a staff signature this month, well south of the Tri-Lakes. If the next one targets unincorporated land near Monument, the decision would fall to five county commissioners — and to an aquifer the region is already racing to escape.

A plan to drop hundreds of apartments onto a rural stretch of Highway 83 reunites a familiar Tri-Lakes cast — and the county’s own staff recommends approval even as the county’s own plan argues against it.

How Baptist Road got its name: a vanished fox farm, the Black Forest Baptist Assembly summer camp, a salvaged bell — and why the only church on the road today is Lutheran.